At your next soiree, stay away from boring subjects such as who's divorcing whom in Hollywood or which bigfoot journalist is less reprehensible than which in Washington, DC. Instead, talk about Internet domain registration, which is emerging as a major topic within the geek community and the world at large.

Less than two weeks after the U.S. private-public agency ICANN received the go-ahead at the United Nations WSIS meeting in Tunis to retain control over domain registration, ICANN in turn proposed to allow Verisign to handle this task for it through the year 2012. And just as there were howls of protest that the U.S.-based ICANN would be prone to exerting undue influence over the Internet in our global village, there are new howls coming from global registrars over Verisign's continued monopoly on the key aspect of this critical function.

ICANN's draft proposal would give VeriSign exclusive control over the .com domain, and is being "vigorously opposed" by a group of notable domain registrars led by 1&1 Internet, who claim the plan harms competition within the Internet industry and could negatively impact end-users worldwide.

1&1, which was founded in Germany and has a major U.S. office in the Philadelphia area,  has announced that it is critical of both the content of the proposed agreement—which, among other things, would allow VeriSign to arbitrarily increase domain fees up to seven percent per year—and the manner in which it was drafted.

“The current draft of the agreement practically assigns .com to VeriSign forever,” said 1&1’s Domain Expert Eric Schaetzlein, who will present the registrar community’s concerns to ICANN at its meeting this week in Vancouver. “This contradicts ICANN’s core mission to promote competition in the Internet industry, which was established in its own by-laws and in the Memorandum of Understanding with the U.S. Department of Commerce.”

Schaetzlein says registrars’ biggest concern with the proposal is the effect that the potential seven percent annual fee increases could have on global Internet users, and the fact that VeriSign can implement the price hikes without justification.

Meanwhile, two industry groups, The Coalition for ICANN Transparency (CFIT) and the World Association of Domain Name Developers (WADND), have filed antitrust lawsuits in U.S. federal court this week. 

• ICANN Faces Multiple Challenges